America’s Laziest States

Pack up the pork cracklins. We’re moving to Louisiana, recently declared America’s laziest state by Businessweek. Finally, we’ll be recognized as the hard-charging go-getters we always thought we would be…but somehow never got around to being. (You know how it is. Things come up.) Sure, the coastline down there is knee-deep in crude oil. But nobody in Louisiana goes to the beach anyway. What do they do? Well, they sleep a lot: an average of 8 hours, 44 minutes a day. They watch television: 3 hours, 5 minutes a day (second most in the U.S., after South Carolina). And they don’t work much: 2 hours, 41 minutes daily. (That’s less than us!) Businessweek ranked states based on the amount of free time residents spend on physically inactive pursuits, such as sleeping, watching TV, thinking, socializing and surfing the Web. Laziest states after Louisiana are Mississippi, Arkansas, North Carolina and Tennessee. Most active states? North Dakota and Hawaii.

Join the coffee achievers. On the other hand, if you’re looking to locate in a place where the people are bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and vibrating gently all day, go to Seattle. The city was just named most-caffeinated in the U.S. by website Daily Beast. Second is Portland, followed by San Jose, Calif., Denver and San Francisco. (We know you’re wondering so we’ll just tell you: residents of Montana drink the most beer, 44 gallons a year.)Make ours a double. A lot of experts these days are talking about the oncoming double-dip recession. Famed Yale economics prof Robert Shiller recently pegged the odds of a second recession at better than 50 percent. “I actually expect it,” he said. (Maybe we should move to Montana instead of Louisiana.)

Sister, can you spare a dime? A new Labor Department report on women’s earnings reveals that women who work part-time jobs now make more, on average, than part-time men. Not a lot more: the median weekly pay for female part-timers is $229, as opposed to $222 for men. And men working 40 hours and above still out-earn their female counterparts by a lot. But the gap is closing. Whereas full-time women over 35 earn only about three-quarters what their male counterparts do, full-time women under 35 earn 90 percent of what full-time men earn.

So now maybe women can pay for the wine. And they do. The Wine Market Council says women wine drinkers in the U.S. now outnumber men. Fifty-three percent of all American wine drinkers are women and there are as many women “core drinkers” (who drink wine at least once a week) as there are men. Maybe they saw this study by Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, which showed that women who drink wine gain less weight than women who don’t. (Note to our last date: wine coolers don’t count.)